That Joan Manuel Serrat, the “lying singer”, is doing his farewell tour is unfortunate news, not only for his fans, but for art in general. Those who still value the lyrics in a song have surely been orphans for a long time before the current “music”, where everything passes and nothing remains.
The very cold night of Wednesday 27 in April, the Catalan started with a full house in the “ Beacon Theatre” in New York his goodbye tour, “The vice of singing 1965-2022”. In this city he sang for the first time in 1976, when he already had at least two five-year career. Here now he resumed his candle descent: like all Serrat he spent “two or three years without singing” due to the pandemic. And at some point during that unprecedented global parenthesis – the previous one was when he was born in 1536, in the middle of the 2nd world war – he made the bittersweet decision to retire. The tour is scheduled to end on December –of course- in his native Barcelona.
“Memories are not sincere”, said that night ‘el Nano’ or ‘the boy from Pueblo Seco’ -his hometown-, as it is also known. With that exception and between jokes, he narrated anecdotes of his industrious mother, of his father who was having his birthday that night 43 years of death, and of his three adult children.
Serrat belongs to the select group of Ibero-American singer-songwriters -such as Sabina, Yordano, the Cano brothers, Blades, Guerra- who, without having a great voice, created classic compositions which could well be stories, poems, editorials, manifestos or stories. None of them is perfect -nobody is- in their ideologies and postures, except when so many decades with upheavals in the world accumulate.
In fact, Serrat has defended the Chavista dictatorship of “elections clean and open” that ruined Venezuela; and has criticized the “excessive pressure” against the Castros in Cuba, when at the same time he proclaimed in a song that many “have not realized that Karl Marx is dead and buried.”
But his talent wins from afar. Baptized –Penélope, Benito, Lucía– or generic ones like the mother-in-law “Señora”, “those crazy little ones”, “the walker who heard the poet scream”, the life that “from time to time kisses us on the mouth”, the child happy “when he leaves school”, the “every crazy person with his theme” or the boyfriends who “were fifteen years old”, Serrat spent decades creating characters of love, nostalgia, despair, irony, misery, tenderness, homelessness, street and tavern , which could well be us, the neighbor, the beggar on the corner or the one who, without having met him, we do not doubt that he exists.
As he so well explained on Wednesday, a song is a “marriage of convenience” between lyrics and music, “a coffee with milk, that once mixed cannot be separated”. In your case, fortunately. In others, due to bad luck.
Beacon Theater (NYC) home full for Serrat / Photo: Andrés Correa Guatarasma.